Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Why Mock?

In an episode of the TV show Sports Night, the character Dan Rydell, an anchor for the eponymous show, asks the question while anchoring the NFL Draft, "Why should we care?" Being selected as a 1st round pick as opposed to being picked in the second round represents a difference of millions of dollars....so the athletes definitely care. But why should we care—we couch potato sports fans who will never see the field of play in an NFL game let only the money—at all?

Why do we care so passionately if some young linebacker from BYU ends up going to the Colts at the end of round 2, or to Carolina in a trade-up in the middle of round 3? Further, why do some of us spend useless hours writing up drafts, months and months before the actual draft takes place? Why do we spend our time creating a mock draft and then post it to a message board only to have another mock draft fanatic hurl abuses at us for our stupidity?

Yet we do. Last year's NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers had an estimated average viewing audience of just under 9 million people per game. By comparison, over 30 million people watched the draft last year. Bizarre, no? Because while the NFL Draft is fantastically long—two full days, over sixteen hours—there isn't one play, one point scored. There are no exciting dunks, breathtaking bombs or awesome home runs. In fact, there's nothing resembling excitement or tension. If anything, it's more like homework, lots of backbreaking homework, with hours of reviewing and one big final that means everything. And more often than not, you lose.

Yet, ESPN broadcasts each and every second of it, up to and including the final, 7th round. And more likely than not, those 30 million people at home, are on the web commenting on each of the selections on NFL message boards while thumbing have a special draft magazine covering draft prospects and with full mock drafts sold by Street & Smiths, Lindy's, The Sporting News, Pro Football Weekly and ESPN (among others) for eight dollars or more. Ourlads.com "complete draft package" costs $55.00.

But why? 16 hours of conference room tables and talking heads trying to fill dead TV time does not sound like the recipe for thrilling sports entertainment. Yet somehow it is.

Why Would You Want To Do That?For years and years, the NFL Draft took place in a nondescript hotel conference room filled with cigar-chomping men who looked like overweight Mike Ditkas and that the results were published in the newspapers the next week or so, if anybody cared.

Then in 1980, ESPN, a fledgling new network that needed something, anything, sports-related to broadcast, saw the perfect time-eater in the NFL Draft. ESPN figured, while the draft was definitely not scintillating TV, it filled a lot of hours, and it was better than high school curling, which took up most of ESPN's broadcasting at that time. So they went to then NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and asked for permission to broadcast the NFL Draft in its entirety. Rozelle said, "Why would you want to do that?"

Funny thing happened though. This event that no one ever thought to broadcast and defies every logical tenet of sports entertainment—there's no competition, no violence, no drama—became a phenomenon. A cult audience grew. And grew. And then grew some more. Soon, people were waiting outside all night for a chance to watch the draft, live. By the end of the 80s, loud, raucous groups of fans (many of them, irate Jet fans who always hate whatever pick their team makes—usually with reason) came to cheer and jeer. Niche experts gained an odd popularity, building entire enterprises based solely on this one day. No one is more famous for this than Mel Kiper, a bouffant-sculpted 30-year guru of the NFL Draft.

It Started Out As A HobbyHow does one become a guru of a noncompetitive wing of a violent and popular sport? During an interview with ESPN, Mel Kiper explained how we got started:

I was a big fan of the NFL and college football. I saw the impact of the draft then. It was the only way you could improve your football team from year to year. There was no free agency, there were very few trades.

I always thought, if this is the only way to increase your talent base, there should be huge interest in this. I thought any college or NFL fan should crave the kind of information that I was interested in. The GM of the Baltimore Colts at that time, Ernie Accorsi, was a good friend of mine, and he basically encouraged me. He told me that fans would crave that type of information, that I should take it public and turn it into a business.

And Kiper was not alone. The late, great Joel Buchsbaum of Pro Football Weekly became involved with the draft even earlier than Kiper. In the early 70s, Buchsbaum was set on the road to following his father's footsteps and becoming an attorney. That is, until his hobby of writing scouting reports on college football players—imitating the scouting reports of Carl and Pete Marasco in Pro Football Weekly—eventually took over, and he left his career path to follow the NFL Draft full-time. As Buchsbaum later said: "It started out as a hobby and became a job."

And for thousands and thousands of people out there, it is becoming not just a hobby, but an obsession. Just Google "NFL Mock Draft" and you'll see that there are thousands of sites—featuring mock drafts, personal opinions and more—all amateurly run, all for nothing more than the love of the draft.

I think after the Super Bowl, it's the second biggest event, not just in the NFL, but in sports.

So says Scott Wright, owner and sole proprietor of www.draftcountdown.com, the world's most popular NFL Draft site. The site is completely free as well, which is amazing, considering that Wright maintains the site as a full-time job, year-round. That's right, all year round. The day after the 2009 NFL Draft, Wright's site will began the march to the 2010 NFL Draft (if it hasn't started already). For him, the NFL Draft is not just a hobby, it's a career.

I just became interested in it in high school, started messing around, making my own site. And it took off from there. Now I get to say, I get to work on the NFL Draft full-time.

Colin Lindsay of www.gbnreport.com also works full-time on his own NFL Draft web site. He started his web site because: "...in the late 1970s there was absolutely no coverage of the actual draft up here in Canada, so I would take a day or two of annual leave from my job, but still go into the office, spread out my rating sheets and call the old sports ticker every 5-10 minutes to get the latest picks and followed the draft pick by pick that way."

Both Lindsay and Wright know that they aren't alone in their interest in the Draft and it's popularity. Lindsay says, "The interest in the draft is very real; indeed, it's become a year round thing, and for a lot of sports fans draft weekend has become the #2 'holiday' on the calendar after Christmas."

Those Who Can'tSo still the question remains: Why would so many people devote such time over what is essentially a convention? The draft is homework rather than great hits, paper-shuffling rather than high energy breakaway runs. It's 16 hours of "sports entertainment" that doesn't have a football, a field, or a scoreboard. What it has is men putting names on a bulletin board. It has the assistant NFL Commissioner and little-known kids in suits and caps. Says Lindsay:

I believe for many sports fans the NFL draft provides the best opportunity to play along at being GM for a day---and how many NFL fans don't fantasize about being general manager of their particular team.

Is that what it's about? A fantasy football-like "Let's Pretend we're a GM." Perhaps. Instead of pretending to be Peyton Manning or Brian Urlacher, people are pretending to be Mike Tannenbaum or Scott Pioli. With fantasy football's popularity and the growing communities on the web of amateurs, "draftniks" abound on the web.

One such draftnik is Robert Bryant who not only follows the NFL Draft on a self-run web site, but on two. Bryant owns and runs NFLDraftDog.com as well as NFL-Draft-Site.com, both comprehensive sites that he frequently updates in addition to having a full-time job as a police officer for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He writes on his site that he: "...personally scouts NFL Draft prospects by analyzing hours upon hours of game film and has multiple contacts within the industry, including current and former NFL Scouts, coaches, current and former players, experienced sports writers and other Draftniks."

There's that old much-abused saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." Perhaps there's something in that for the draftniks. Since Wright and Lindsay and Buschbaum and Kiper and Bryant and the 30 million other people who watch the draft can't run a 4.3 40-yard dash or throw a laser spiral into triple coverage, to become a part of the the game they love, they do what they can do. And that is, obsessively watch game after game after game, analyze, form strong opinions of what they see, and pretend that they have a say in the future of their team.

So old men, young men, fat men, thin men, "unathletic" men will sit around, either in New York City at the actual draft, or on their couches, in front of their TV, or on their computer, linked to other unathletic men, all cheering or booing, full of opinions and tirades, and watch hour after hour, to see if their teams pick the way they guessed they would. So the question is not why should we care, and is it wrong to, but why would anyone fault us if we do.

BE A PLAYER!

About Me

Born and raised in Brooklyn, I'm a sports junkie with an overabundance of opinions and a unused degree in writing. I decided to let vent with this blog and hope somebody out there would like to read what I write. Hope you enjoy, and if you do or don't let me know what you think.